Apps are dying. Long live the subservient bots ready to fulfil your every desire

Bots

08 Nov 2016

Greg Boschetti, an enterprise account manager for Slack, took to the stage at WIRED Retail to explain how the platform recently helped transform the e-commerce startupJet.com into a highly successful, international business in just over a year.

READ NEXT

From AR to robots, we're finally getting the store of the future

ByBen Sullivan

Jet.com decided to use Slack as a way to increase productivity in the office and reduce the need for email, something that became more and more useful as the team began growing. Slack's chat bots helped change how the Jet.com team functioned and became integral to the brand's success.

"When you're an e-commerce business, your website needs to be up and running to keep your business going," explained Boschetti. "Jet.com uses PagerDuty to ensure the site is running efficiently - if it isn't, PagerDuty will post in the Slack channel and assign the issue to someone to fix."

"The whole team knows something is wrong, they know action is being taken and can jump in to help one another out," said Boschetti.

ADVERTISEMENT

READ NEXT

eBay, Made.com, Wheelys and Grabble confirm for WIRED Retail

The team uses another bot, named Doctor Doom after the Fantastic Four villan. This is a custom integration which monitors Jet.com's intake system and its inventory management system - if there is an anomaly it will compare it against the inventory management system and let the team know there is a problem with the supply chain, hopefully before a customer does.

ADVERTISEMENT

READ NEXT

The e-commerce site began in July 2015 and it was recently sold for $3.3 billion (£2.6bn) to Walmart. It credits Slack's functionality as one reason for its success in such a short space of time.

ADVERTISEMENT

"At the base level, Slack will always be built on messaging," he said, but the platform can be built upon to make it work better for the 21st Century workforce. The platform component is being built on to help improve teams' workflows, for instance Slack recently teamed up with IBM Watson to give the app its first AI-powered update.

"This adds a layer of intelligence into how teams' workflows are moving and it can provide recommendations on how to improve work," explained Boschetti. "It will start to know when information is important to me and customise my search results."

All this is part of Slack's grand masterplan to give teams an efficient way to work no matter where they are.

Updated 18.11.16, 11:33: Jet.com was sold to Walmart for $3.3 billion, not $3.3 million.